Editor’s Note: This article contains reference to sexual assault.

A bizarre trend in right-wing rhetoric is the tendency to make statements which, in isolation, may sound anti-male — even as right-wingers will excoriate progressives for supposedly being “anti-male.” However, what these right-wingers really are is simply anti-gay, anti-nonwhite and anti-trans.

Here’s a clip from conservative commentator Matt Walsh in which he says that he would never hire a nonfamilial male babysitter for his kids. He really hammers it home — it’s statistically dangerous, and no parent would do such a thing.

Now, to what end am I adducing this clip? Is it to provide evidence for a misandrist trend among conservatives or anti-progressives?

Of course not. Walsh, for example, would be the first to discuss the “war on masculinity” led by “the left.” Conservatives more broadly frequently criticize social theories such as rape culture and toxic masculinity as fatuous, absurd and damaging to men.

I don’t know if Walsh is reasonable for his parenting approach here or not, not being a parent myself. But I do know that he and his ilk would be the first to call feminists “anti-male” for distrusting men around themselves or their children.

However, the apparent contradiction makes sense when you realize that he is only discussing his and other parents’ distrust of male babysitters as a jumping-off point to criticize gay adoption. So it’s not about men as a whole — he is using this outer position to go after gay men.

Walsh’s words are not the only instantiation of this strange, apparently counterintuitive method of argumentation. Here’s a 2016 article from the Associated Press discussing some of the output from Breitbart News. Breitbart is a famously reactionary paper. The AP author quotes a Breitbart article that warns about the dangers of “rape culture,” referencing the aforementioned feminist theory.

Could this be a rare aisle-crossing moment for Breitbart?

No. In a predictable turn, the Breitbart author — a member of the U.S. House of Representatives — was only mentioning rape culture in the context of Muslim immigrants, a group that would likely bring “Islam’s rape culture” to an American “town near you.” Needless to say, millions of Muslims live in America, and in cities with the largest Muslim populations such as Dearborn, Michigan, there is no evidence of this particularized, uniquely Muslim rape culture in America.

Once more, we find an extraordinarily conservative figure engaging in feminist-sounding rhetoric but only as the spoonful of sugar to help the dreadful poison of reaction go down. Breitbart is not universally anti-male, and they certainly are not trying to mount some well-reasoned analysis of rape culture. It’s about keeping nonwhite men — and nonwhite people in general — out of the country. Any patina of care for women over hatred of Muslims is quickly dispelled when you see the author’s article in the context of his public profile.

One final example — President Trump, like many Republicans, has been on a crusade against “men using women’s bathrooms.” This would mark a strong, perhaps heavy-handed, shift from President Trump’s past in which he barged into beauty pageant changing rooms.

But, unsurprisingly, this is about trans people and the hypothetical danger they would cause if let into the bathrooms of their choosing. The fact that there is positively no support beyond scattered anecdotes for the existence of this danger is immaterial. It isn’t about protection — it’s about exclusion.

Time and again, conservatives weaponize progressive-sounding rhetoric, but only ever to gain a veneer of moral authority. The ultimate result is always, without fail, to exclude a minority group.

The trend is not a new phenomenon and has been a staple of reactionary rhetoric from time immemorial. Conservatives have diligently argued against immigration, affirmative action, civil rights legislation and other progressive planks by appealing to superficially progressive bromides. But immediately under the surface, it becomes apparent that bigotry is almost always the driving force behind their objections.

The next time you are listening to a discussion about any contentious social issue, feel free to look for this dynamic; it is all too common.